There’s many things a non-coder or a hacker in training can do to help projects. If you are interested in helping Epiphany/WebKit come by #epiphany on GimpNet or send an email to the list, we’ll think of somethinng for you ;)

A bit ambitious? Admittedly, python is very easy to learn. And PyGTK makes it easy to create GTK apps. I found the easiest way to learn way using the official tutorial: http://docs.python.org/tut/ (also available in many other formats). Worked for me. Pity all those apps are probably written in different languages though…

The most important thing in programming (or learning to program) is to have fun.

The second most important thing is to set your goals in small, bite-sized pieces. Things you’re reasonably sure you can achieve in a couple of hours. If you achieve them, you get the sense of satisfaction that makes programming fun. If not, you can pick some other small task. Every big task can be split into several smaller ones.

One thing to remember is that in programming everything is more difficult than you initially thought. Heck, I’ve been programming for over fifteen years, and I still continually underestimate the difficulty of programming tasks.

Python is a great language. It lets you express your thoughts without having to fight the syntax or getting bogged in the details. It will not directly help with most of your goals (those projects that are written in C or Java), but the main concepts of those languages are pretty similar, and the more languages you learn, the easier is to learn new ones.